With the funky, bad-ass Smoking Cheeba-Cheeba. A bit of a skeleton in the closet, surely — the debauched transition from Wes Montgomery-styled 60s soul jazz, to the urbane sophistication of his super-stardom.

Gorgeous, wistful, tentative two-step from her late, hard-to-find, 1974 LP Love Rhymes (with production by Johnny Guitar Watson and David Axelrod).
Bim.

Plenty of TKOs — the Colombian opener, for example — beautifully presented.
A moving, mind-boggling testament to Afrobeat, with shout-outs from Ghana, Trinidad, the US and elsewhere.

Barney ‘Blair’ Perry was the Blackbyrds’ guitarist for their first two albums. He wrote the mighty Walking In Rhythm. Here he is in 1978 with another killer piece of jazzed-up, how-we-roll, funky disco; massive on the two-step scene.

Soul scorchers from Louisiana. A brilliantly convincing cover of Howard Tate, about relationship mindgames, hazily riven with sexual desire; and hard, driven funk on the flip, about men treating women badly. The red-hot band is Buckwheat and his Hitchhikers, before he turned to zydeco — recorded cyclophonically, according to the original label.

Gorgeous, open-hearted Detroit soul music from 1973.
Beautifully produced by Dee Ervin, with vocal accompaniments by Patti Hamilton from The Lovelites, Jean Plum and co.
Newly transferred from the original master tapes, and restored.

The CD adds the sides Hutton cut earlier for Blue Rock (where his collaborators included the genius likes of Donny Hathaway and Joshie Jo Armstead), and also his 7” follow-up to the LP: everything from 1969 to 1974 is here.